It was early afternoon when Theron walked out of his yard, bestowing no glance upon the withered and tarnished show of the garden, and started with a definite step down the street. The tendency to ruminative loitering, which those who saw him abroad always associated with his tall, spare figure, was not suggested today. He moved forward like a man with a purpose.
All the forenoon in the seclusion of the sitting-room, with a book opened before him, he had been thinking hard. It was not the talk with Alice that occupied his thoughts. That rose in his mind from time to time, only as a disagreeable blur, and he refused to dwell upon it. It was nothing to him, he said to himself, what Gorringe\'s motives in lying had been. As for Alice, he hardened his heart against her. Just now it was her mood to try and make up to him. But it had been something different yesterday, and who could say what it would be tomorrow? He really had passed the limit of patience with her shifting emotional vagaries, now lurching in this direction, now in that. She had had her chance to maintain a hold upon his interest and imagination, and had let it slip. These were the accidents of life, the inevitable harsh happenings in the great tragedy of Nature. They could not be helped, and there was nothing more to be said.
He had bestowed much more attention upon what the priest had said the previous evening. He passed in review all the glowing tributes Father Forbes had paid to Celia. They warmed his senses as he recalled them, but they also, in a curious, indefinite way, caused him uneasiness. There had been a personal fervor about them which was something more than priestly. He remembered how the priest had turned pale and faltered when the question whether Celia would escape the general doom of her family came up. It was not a merely pastoral agitation that, he felt sure.
A hundred obscure hints, doubts, stray little suspicions, crowded upward together in his thoughts. It became apparent to him now that from the outset he had been conscious of something queer—yes, from that very first day when he saw the priest and Celia together, and noted their glance of recognition inside the house of death. He realized now, upon reflection, that the tone of other people, his own parishioners and his casual acquaintances in Octavius alike, had always had a certain note of reservation in it when it touched upon Miss Madden. Her running in and out of the pastorate at all hours, the way the priest patted her on the shoulder before others, the obvious dislike the priest\'s ugly old housekeeper bore her, the astonishing freedom of their talk with each other—these dark memories loomed forth out of a mass of sinister conjecture.
He could bear the uncertainty no longer. Was it indeed not entirely his own fault that it had existed thus long? No man with the spirit of a mouse would have shilly-shallied in this preposterous fashion, week after week, with the fever of a beautiful woman\'s kiss in his blood, and the woman herself living only round the corner. The whole world had been as good as offered to him—a bewildering world of wealth and beauty and spiritual exaltation and love—and he, like a weak fool, had waited for it to be brought to him on a salver, as it were, and actually forced upon his acceptance! “That is my failing,” he reflected; “these miserable ecclesiastical bandages of mine have dwarfed my manly side. The meanest of Thurston\'s clerks would have shown a more adventurous spirit and a bolder nerve. If I do not act at once, with courage and resolution, everything will be lost. Already she must think me unworthy of the honor it was in her sweet will to bestow.” Then he remembered that she was now always at home. “Not another hour of foolish indecision!” he whispered to himself. “I will put my destiny to the test. I will see her today!”
A middle-aged, plain-faced servant answered his ring at the door-bell of the Madden mansion. She was palpably Irish, and looked at him with a saddened preoccupation in her gray eyes, holding the door only a little ajar.
Theron had got out one of his cards. “I wish to make inquiry about young Mr. Madden—Mr. Michael Madden,” he said, holding the card forth tentatively. “I have only just heard of his illness, and it has been a great grief to me.”
“He is no better,” answered the woman, briefly.
“I am the Rev. Mr. Ware,” he went on, “and you may say that, if he is well enough, I should be glad to see him.”
The servant peered out at him with a suddenly altered expression, then shook her head. “I don\'t think he would be wishing to see YOU,” she replied. It was evident from her tone that she suspected the visitor\'s intentions.
Theron smiled in spite of himself. “I have not come as a clergyman,” he explained, “but as a friend of the family. If you will tell Miss Madden that I am here, it will do just as well. Yes, we won\'t bother him. If you will kindly hand my card to his sister.”
When the domestic turned at this and went in, Theron felt like throwing his hat in the air, there where he stood. The woman\'s churlish sectarian prejudices had played ideally into his hands. In no other imaginable way could he have asked for Celia so naturally. He wondered a little that a servant at such a grand house as this should leave callers standing on the doorstep. Still more he wondered what he should say to the lady of his dream when he came into her presence.
“Will you please to walk this way?” The woman had returned. She closed the door noiselessly behind him, and led the way, not up the sumptuous staircase, as Theron had expected, but along through the broad hall, past several large doors, to a small curtained archway at the end. She pushed aside this curtain, and Theron found himself in a sort of conservatory, full of the hot, vague light of sunshine falling through ground-glass. The air was moist and close, and heavy with the smell of verdure and wet earth. A tall bank of palms, with ferns sprawling at their base, reared itself directly in front of him. The floor was of mosaic, and he saw now that there were rugs upon it, and that there were chairs and sofas, and other signs of habitation. It was, indeed, only half a greenhouse, for the lower part of it was in rosewood panels, with floral paintings on them, like a room.
Moving to one side of the barrier of palms, he discovered, to his great surprise, the figure of Michael, sitting propped up with pillows in a huge easy-chair. The sick man was looking at him with big, gravely intent eyes. His face did not show as much change as Theron had in fancy pictured. It had seemed almost as bony and cadaverous on the day of the picnic. The hands spread out on the chair-arms were very white and thin, though, and the gaze in the blue eyes had a spectral quality which disturbed him.
Michael raised his right hand, and Theron, stepping forward, took it limply in his for an instant. Then he laid it down again. The touch of people about to die had always been repugnant to him. He could feel on his own warm palm the very damp of the grave.
“I only heard from Father Forbes last evening of your—your ill-health,” he said, somewhat hesitatingly. He seated himself on a bench beneath the palms, facing the invalid, but still holding his hat. “I hope very sincerely that you will soon be all right again.”
“My sister is lying down in her room,” answered Michael. He had not once taken his sombre and embarrassing gaze from the other\'s face. The voice in which he uttered this uncalled-for remark was thin in fibre, cold and impassive. It fell upon Theron\'s ears with a suggestion of hidden meaning. He looked uneasily into Michael\'s eyes, and then away again. They seemed to be looking straight through him, and there was no shirking the sensation that they saw and comprehended things with an unnatural prescience.
“I hope she is feeling better,” Theron found himself saying. “Father Forbes mentioned that she was a little under the weather. I dined with him last night.”
“I am glad that you came,” said Michael, after a little pause. His earnest, unblinking eyes seemed to supplement his tongue with speech of their own. “I do be thinking a great deal about you. I have matters to speak of to you, now that you are here.”
Theron bowed his head gently, in token of grateful attention. He tried the experiment of looking away from Michael, but his glance went back again irresistibly, and fastened itself upon the sick man\'s gaze, and clung there.
“I am next door to a dead man,” he went on, paying no heed to the other\'s deprecatory gesture. “It is not years or months with me, but weeks. Then I go away to stand up for judgment on my sins, and if it is His merciful will, I shall see God. So I say my good-byes now, and so you will let me speak plainly, and not think ill of what I say. You are much changed, Mr. Ware, since you came to Octavius, and it is not a change for the good.”
Theron lifted his brows in unaffected surprise, and put inquiry into his glance.
“I don\'t know if Protestants will be saved, in God\'s good time, or not,” continued Michael. “I find there are different opinions among the clergy about that, and of course it is not for me, only a plain mechanic, to be sure where learned and pious scholars are in doubt. But I am sure about one thing. Those Protestants, and others too, mind you, who profess and preach good deeds, and themselves do bad deeds—they will never be saved. They will have no chance at all to escape hell-fire.”
“I think we are all agreed upon that, Mr. Madden,” said Theron, with surface suavity.
“Then I say to you, Mr. Ware, you are yourself in a bad path. Take the warning of a dying man, sir, and turn from it!”
The impulse to smile tugged at Theron\'s facial muscles. This was really too droll. He looked up at the ceiling, the while he forced his countenance into a polite composure, then turned again to Michael, with some conciliatory commonplace ready for utterance. But he said nothing, and all suggestion of levity left his mind, under the searching inspection bent upon him by the young man\'s hollow eyes. What did Michael suspect? What did he know? What was he hinting at, in this strange talk of his?
“I saw you often on the street when first you came here,” continued Michael. “I knew the man who was here before you—that is, by sight—and he was not a good man. But your face, when you came, pleased me. I liked to look at you. I was tormented just then, do you see, that so many decent, kindly people, old school-mates and friends and neighbors of mine—and, for that matter, others all over the country must lose their souls because they were Protestants. At my boyhood and young manhood, that thought took the joy out of me. Sometimes I usen\'t to sleep a whole night long, for thinking that some lad I had been playing with, perhaps in his own house, that very day, would be taken when he died, and his mother too, when she died, and thrown into the flames of hell for all eternity. It made me so unhappy that finally I wouldn\'t go to any Protestant boy\'s house, and have his mother be nice to me, and give me cake and apples—and me thinking all the while that they were bound to be damned, no matter how good they were to me.”
The primitive humanity of this touched Theron, and he nodded approbation with a tender smile in his eyes, forgetting for the moment that a personal application of the monologue had been hinted at.
“But then later, as I grew up,” the sick man went on, “I learned that it was not altogether certain. Some of the authorities, I found, maintained that it was doubtful, and some said openly that there must be salvation possible for good people who lived in ignorance of the truth through no fault of their own. Then I had hope one day, and no hope the next, and as I did my work I thought it over, and in the evenings my father and I talked it over, and we settled nothing of it at all. Of course, how could we?”
“Did you ever d............